My musings and little nothings about what I see, hear, perceive, contemplate and experience.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Come, let’s breed the next generation of thieves

She walked back home with a leap in her step. Her toes,
hard, crusted and baked under the heat, kicked and tossed up small clouds of
dust along the way, for she had no shoes.

She held three exercise books in her right hand. Her left
hand, holding a red lead pencil, was busy, caught up in the complex task of holding
her blue hole-riddled skirt from slipping down from her waist, for the skirt had
no buttons.

She finally made it home, a journey which included jumping
across the one-metre-wide trench of waste and filth, and jumping over saucepans
and basins and babies crawling towards inflamed cooking stoves.

She sat in the one-roomed house that was a living room
during the day but a bedroom during the night for both her three siblings, and,
their parents. She’d been dismissed from school. Again. And this time round,
signs were that it would probably be the last time.

She was 12 years old now, soon making 13. Her breasts had
started tearing straight through her chest the way shoots germinate from the
soil. She would never go back to school again because there was simply no money
to pay for the tuition. In fact, her elder brother, now 16, was already out of
school. He was now at a video shack watching movies. Later in the day, he would
go to town to meet a friend who had promised to enlist him in a gang where he
would learn how to make money very quickly.

Three years later, she would be pregnant with her first
child after becoming a regular in the slum’s prostitution circuit. She would
have followed straight into her mother’s steps. Her brother would be a bullet-scar
boasting burglar, furnishing his skills in lock-disabling. He would have
followed straight into his father’s footsteps.

Ten years later, she will have three children. Twenty
years later, she will have six children, maybe more. But she will still be too
poor to take them all to school. And at 12 years old, her first born child
would drop out of school. By 16, she would be a mother. And by 32, she too
would have six children.

The bullet-scar boasting burglar would graduate into a hard-core
criminal, with a CV boasting of high profile murders and kidnappings, in 10
years’ time. He too would have six children in 20 years’ time, or more, but
from five mothers, or more. And at 16, his first born son, already dropped out
of school, would also join his first gang, and start a life-long career in thievery.

And the cycle of poverty and crime and destitution would
continue, unhindered, for this section of the urban poor. While the country's thought process bothered itself on how it would provide the next generation of scientists and innovators, there would absolutely be no need to worry about where the next generation of thieves would come from; because with every pregnancy conceived, a steady supply of robbers and thieves, for generations to come, would be maintained.

And maybe, just maybe, you think
poor people should not be allowed to give birth.